Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Watercolour on paper Paper size: 7.5 x 10.5 inches Framed size: 15 x 17.5 inches Signed lower left

"Behind my canvases, collages, and drawings lies a singular proposition: places are not inert; they are repositories for all that passes through them. My work is an inquiry into the ...

Medium: Watercolor Painting Signature: Signed on Verso Sight Size 10.00" x 13.00;" Framed 17.00" x 21.00" Saturday Evening Post Advertisement

Stanley Spencer Sword of the Lord c.1935 Pencil on paper 17.8 x 25.4 cms (7 x 10 ins) SS8308

"The Palace" Manuel Santelices Unique piece Ink, gouache and watercolor on archival paper 11 in. H x 14 in. W Unframed The worlds of fashion, society and pop culture are explored t...

Building New York Watercolor on paper, c. 1915 Signed by the artist lower right (see photo) Partial watermark: "MADE IN ENGLAND... LINEN FIBER" Excellent, COLORS FRESH AND VIBRANT Br...

Kallem, Henry. PORCH - MONHEGAN. Ink on paper, not dated. Signed in ink within the matrix, lower right. 16 x 20 inches, the full sheet. In excellent condition.

verso: signed and dated "H. Tavernier, 1779"

Paul Cézanne Le Sentier ca. 1890 Watercolour and pencil on paper 34.6 x 51.5 cms (13 5/8 x 20 1/4 ins) PC16325

Medium: Watercolor on Board Signature: Signed Lower Left Jerusalem Street Scene

Hailey Lever 'Corinthian Yacht Club, Marblehead, Mass.', watercolor, c. 1925. Signed in pencil, lower right. Titled in pencil, verso. A fine, spontaneous watercolor, with fresh color...

untitled (Hillside in Spring) Gouache on paper, c. 1965 Signed with the estate stamp lower right Provenance: Estate of the artist by decent William C. Grauer (1895-1985) was born in Philadelphia to German immigrant parents. After attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Grauer received a four year scholarship from the City of Philadelphia to pursue post graduate work. It was during this time that Grauer began working as a designer at the Decorative Stained Glass Co. in Philadelphia. Following his World War I service in France, Grauer moved to Akron, Ohio where he opened a studio in 1919 with his future brother-in-law, the architect George Evans...

Mejdel Yaba. 20 September, 1918 Pencil, ink and watercolour on paper. 8 1/8 x 22. Provenance: The Fine Art Society. Annotated, upper left, "due N at ???' Dated on the ink drawing on ...

Barr, Wyatt. NEWRY. Drawing, Charcoal and ink wash on Arches 300lb. Hot Press Watercolor paper, 2014. The subject is a hillside next to Step Falls in Newry, Maine. Signed and dated. ...

Framed, 5.25 x 8.5 x 1.5 in.

Watercolor and gouache on paper

A turn of the century view of the town of St. Austrell, Cornwall, in the morning mist of southern England. A beautifully subtle work, in muted earth tones, on buff wove drawing paper...

William Thon, 'Upper Tuscany', a two-sided watercolor, c. 1955. Signed, lower right; titled verso. A fine, expressionist work, with fresh colors, on cream watercolor paper; the image...

Fenn, Harry. A VENEZUELAN STATION and THE FALLS OF "EL NEGRO" CUYUNI RIVER. Ink and wash, 1896. Two drawings, the original artwork for illustrations accompanying "Glimpses of Venzuela," an article by W. Nephew King published in Century Magazine, July, 1896, pp. 358-368. Each about 9 x 11 inches, in very good condition, and framed. King is best known for his writings about the Spanish-American War of 1898. Harry Fenn, 1845-1911, was born in England, but worked in the United States. He was a painter, and printmaker, but is known primarily as a book and magazine illustrator. He illustrated books of poetry for John Greenleaf Whittier, and in 1870 was hired to do illustrations for Picturesque America, which was edited by William Cullen Bryant...

Pen on paper Paper size: 10.75 x 16 inches Framed size: 22.75 x 27.75 inches Signed and inscribed lower right Provenance: Private collection, France

PLAN OF A PART OF NEWPORT, R.I. SHOWING CHANGES IN HIGHWAYS ASKED FOR BY O.H.P. BELMONT, ESQ. The original ink and watercolor plan on paper from 1907. The plan is extremely large; if fully assembled it would measure no less than 11.5 feet in height and 6.5 feet in breadth. Segmented and backed on modern linen in four sections – each section is 70 x 39 inches. This grand oversized folding map can be folded down to four sections each 17.5 x 11 inches and stored in a modern made leather and marble paper case 18 x 11.75 x 3 inches. Text continues, "Prepared for Charles Warren Lippitt at the office of J. P. Cotton, C.E. Newport, R.I. Oct. 28, 1907." A fine manuscript plan of the Bellevue neighborhood of Newport, depicting the street layout and the detailed footprints of the area’s many mansions. The plan was produced at the behest of Charles Warren Lippett (1846-1924), who served as governor of Rhode Island from 1895-1897. The Lippett “Breakwater” mansion is also shown on this plan, situated at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. Though the circumstances are unclear, Lippitt seems to have requested the plan be drawn out of some concern for road construction proposed by Oliver Hazard Perry...

Italian Cityscape Pastel on Strathmore paper, 1968 Signed and dated lower right with the estate signature with the initials RH Image size: 13 3/4 x 10...

Julie Bozzi "Two Tone Building Next to Newly Graded Lot" 2009 Gouache on paper 7 x 10 inches Framed

Medium: Ink, Graphite, and Watercolor on Paper Mounted Signature: Signed Lower Right circa 1881 Exhibited: Kennedy Galleries, with their label suggesting the creation date of 1881.

Medium: Watercolor on Paper Signature: Signed Lower Right: Donald Teague N.A. Sight Size 5.00" x 8.50;" Framed 9.50" x 13.00"

Medium: Ink and Paint on Board Kelly Freas Canvas Confidential Vincent Van Gogh "Starry Night" Original Art (Dial Press, 1963). Canvas Confidential was a ...

Watercolour on paper 24.5 x 38 cm (9 ⅝ x 15 inches) Signed, inscribed and dated lower left, Bedford Park 1928 Ludovic Rodo Painted in London during a visit the artist made to his brother Lucien Pissarro...

Skyscrapers. c. 1950. Pastel. 29 3/4 x 19 7/8 (framed 37 x 27). Provenance: The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Signed, lower right. Housed in a stunn...

Colin Hunt (b. 1973) is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist working primarily in egg tempera and watercolor. His recent series of landscapes of the Avebury stone circle outside of London are...

Signed "Lifschitz 85" at lower right The overall dimensions, including the frame, are 26 1/2 x 32 3/8 inches.

Preliminary Drawing for the color aquatint "Street Gossip" Signed by the artist in pencil lower left Graphite on tracing paper, 1916-1917 An impre...

Nathaniel Dirk, Untitled (Gloucester), watercolor, with fresh colors, on watercolor paper; in fine, original condition, with the artist's tack holes (barely visible) at the sheet edg...

Eleanor Park Custis painted scenes as varied as the artist's travels: from her hometown of Washington, D.C., to the coastal towns of New England; from the prosperous fishing villages of Brittany, to Venice and the mountain villages and lakes of northern Italy. While Custis's subjects are diverse, her style is consistent and distinctive throughout this body of work. Her use of flat areas of color delineated by dark contours is reminiscent of the aesthetics of woodblock printing. Like many artists of the day, she was profoundly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and her adaptation of the aesthetic by 1924 led to her most productive artistic period. Eleanor Custis hailed from a socially prominent Washington, D.C., family. She was distantly related to Martha Custis Washington, America's first First Lady. Custis began three years of formal art training in the autumn of 1915 at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, and was guided and inspired by Impressionist artist Edmund C. Tarbell, one of the Ten American Painters, who became the Corcoran School's principal in 1918. Custis exhibited widely in many of the Washington art societies and clubs for much of her career. She was also a frequent exhibitor at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City; her last one-woman show there was in April 1945. Custis's mature style emerged in scenes of the streets, wharves, and drydocks of seacoast villages from Maine to Massachusetts, which she visited during the summers of 1924 and 1925. She was working in Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1924, and painted several gouaches of the town's wharves and winding streets, including In Gloucester Harbor and At the Drydock, Gloucester. During her stay, Custis may have met Jane Peterson or at least must have seen her work, the best of which was executed in Gloucester during the preceding ten years. The similarity between their styles is unmistakable, but, while it may be tempting to suggest that Custis was influenced by Peterson during her summer in Gloucester, the connection between their work is probably more a case of shared aesthetics and common European influences. Custis expanded her subject repertoire with three trips to Europe between 1926 and 1929, and was inspired by the Old World charm of Holland, northern France, Switzerland, and Italy, leading to such works as New Kirk, Delft, Holland, Market Day in Quimper, At the Foot of the Matterhorn, and The Town Square, Varenna. A Mediterranean cruise in 1934 introduced her to the Near East, and the bustling, colorful streets and bazaars of Cairo, captured in works like A Street in Cairo, Egypt and A Moroccan Jug...

Fred Nagler was born in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he first studied wood carving. From 1914 to 1917, he studied at The Art Students League of New York, where his prof...

Medium: Watercolor and Gouache on Board Signature: Unsigned Due to Shinn's fascination with the theater, the booming motion picture industry of the early 20th Century certainly capt...

Medium: Watercolor and Graphite on Illustration Board Signature: Unsigned, Christies Stamp Verso. In silver molded frame, french-lined mat, glazed. OS: 18 1/2" x 22", SS: 11" x 15". Shinn took over from Joseph Urban as the Art Director on the William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures film, shot in New York City and Tarrytown, NY. Directed by E. Mason Hopper, starring Marion Davies...

Medium: Watercolor and Graphite on Illustration Board Signature: Unsigned, Marked "Cosmo #51" Lower Left Contact for exact dimensions. Christies stamp verso. In silver molded frame, french-lined mat, glazed. OS: 18 1/2" x 22", SS: 11" x 15". Shinn took over from Joseph Urban as the Art Director on the William Randolph Hearst...

A native New Yorker, Brosen has spent a lifetime wandering its streets, discovering its long history and witnessing its constant metamorphosis. The city is his muse and his primary s...

Medium: Gouache on Paper Signature: Signed The battle of Cardenas Cuba May 11th 1898 where the American torpedo boat Winslow attacked the Spanish ship An...

Medium: Watercolor over pencil on card Signature: Signed and Dated Lower Right

Signature: Signed Lower Center

Signed and dated (at lower right): BROSEN 21 A native New Yorker, Brosen has spent a lifetime wandering its streets, discovering its long history and witnessing its constant metamor...

Thomas Fransioli’s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, their forms squarely defined by stark light and long shadows. Saturated color permeates every corner of his canvases, from vibrant oranges and greens to smoky terra cottas and granites. Even the trees that line Fransioli’s streets, parks, and squares are sharp and angular, exactly like those in an architect’s elevation rendering. But Fransioli’s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for parked cars and an occasional black cat scurrying across the pavement. People make rare appearances in Fransioli’s compositions, and never does the entropy of a crowd overwhelm their prevailing sense of order and precision. People are implied in a Fransioli painting, but their physical presence would detract from the scene’s bleak and surreal beauty. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli’s artistic viewpoint. The term was first broadly applied to contemporary American art in the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists. As exhibition curator Dorothy Miller noted in her foreword to the catalogue, Magic Realism was a “widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art…. It is limited, in the main, to pictures of sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world—realism, or contrived by the imagination—magic realism.” In his introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein took the concept a step further: “Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed.” This is Fransioli, in a nutshell. His cityscapes exist in time and space, but certainly not in the manner in which he portrays them. Fransioli—and other Magic Realists of his time—was also the heir to Precisionism, spawned from Cubism and Futurism after the Great War and popularized in the 1920s and early 1930s. While Fransioli may not have aspired to celebrate the Machine Age, heavy industry, and skyscrapers in the same manner as Charles Sheeler, his compositions tap into the same rigid gridwork of the urban landscape that was first codified by the Precisionists. During the 1950s, Fransioli was represented by the progressive Margaret Brown...

Veillee Sepulchrale Verso: Study of two figures in a landscape Pen and ink on rose colored Canson watermark paper, 1944 Signed in ink with the artist's initials lower center (see photo) Dated 1944 lower center; Titled in ink upper left corner (see photo) Provenance: Swann Galleries, 2010, realized $900. John Popplestone (1928-2013), Akron, OH collector, noted psychologist and author Berman brothers (painters) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search This article is about the painters. For the American songwriters/producers, see Berman Brothers (producers). Eugene Berman in Italy in the 1960s Eugène Berman (Russian: Евгений Густавович Берман; 4 November 1899, Saint Petersburg, Russia – 14 December 1972, Rome) and his brother Leonid Berman (1896 – 1976[1]) were Russian Neo-romantic painters and theater and opera designers. Contents 1 Early years 2 Later years and death 2.1 Works 3 Legacy 4 See also 5 References Early years Born in Russia, the Bermans fled the Russian revolution in 1918. In Paris the Bermans exhibited at the Galerie Pierre where their work earned them the name "Neo-Romantics" for its melancholy and introspective qualities, having taken inspiration from the Blue Period paintings of Pablo Picasso. Other Neo-Romantic painters were Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev, Kristians...

A native New Yorker, Brosen has spent a lifetime wandering its streets, discovering its long history and witnessing its constant metamorphosis. The city is his muse and his primary s...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

David Johnson was a stalwart of the New York art world in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the fifty years between 1849 and 1899, Johnson exhibited over fifty paintings at the National Academy of Design, where he was an academician. In 1867, Johnson visited a spot above West Point on the Hudson River to paint a view that had long been a favorite of the landscape artists comprising the so-called “Hudson River School.” John Kensett had painted from the same vantage point ten years earlier, describing the area in a letter of 1854 as being “in the midst of the beautiful highlands of the Hudson, which I think for their peculiar kind of beauty there is nothing to surpass” (Kensett to his uncle, John R. Kensett, March 30, 1854, as quoted in Natalie Spassky and Kathleen Luhrs, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol 2: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1816 and 1845 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985], p. 33). The Kensett painting, now called Hudson River Scene...

watercolor, gesso, and gilding on BFK paper. Gold Leaf. Depiction of the Tower Bridge in London. Medieval figures.

This watercolor of New York City bursting with energy in the 1960s is typical of Lersy's colorful and exuberant style. His work combines mid-century Modern abstraction with subjects...

Nicolino Calyo's career reflects a restless spirit of enterprise and adventure. Descended in the line of the Viscontes di Calyo of Calabria, the artist was the son of a Neapolitan army officer. (For a brief biographical sketch of the artist see Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, exhib. cat. [1976], pp. 299-301 no. 257.) Calyo received formal training in art at the Naples Academy. His career took shape amidst the backdrop of the political turbulence of early nineteenth-century Italy, Spain, and France. He fled Naples after choosing the losing side in struggles of 1820-21, and, by 1829, was part of a community of Italian exiles in Malta. This was the keynote of a peripatetic life that saw the artist travel through Europe, to America, to Europe again, and back to America. Paradoxically, Calyo’s stock-in-trade was close observation of people and places, meticulously rendered in the precise topographical tradition of his fellow countrymen, the eighteenth-century vedute painters Antonio Canale (called Canaletto) and Francesco Guardi. In search of artistic opportunity and in pursuit of a living, Calyo left Malta, and, by 1834, was in Baltimore, Maryland. He advertised his skills in the April 16, 1835 edition of the Baltimore American, offering "remarkable views executed from drawings taken on the spot by himself, . . . in which no pains or any resource of his art has been neglected, to render them accurate in every particular" (as quoted in The Art Gallery and The Gallery of the School of Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, 350 Years of Art & Architecture in Maryland, exhib. cat. [1984], p. 35). Favoring gouache on paper as his medium, Calyo rendered faithful visual images of familiar locales executed with a degree of skill and polish that was second nature for European academically-trained artists. Indeed, it was the search for this graceful fluency that made American artists eager to travel to Europe and that led American patrons to seek out the works of ambitious newcomers. On June 16, 1835, the Baltimore Republican reported that Calyo was on his way north to Philadelphia and New York to paint views of those cities. Calyo arrived in New York, by way of Philadelphia, just in time for the great fire of December 1835, which destroyed much of the downtown business district. He sketched the fire as it burned, producing a series of gouaches that combined his sophisticated European painting style with the truth and urgency of on-the-spot observation. Two of his images were given broad currency when William James Bennett reproduced them in aquatint. The New-York Historical Society owns two large Calyo gouaches of the fire, and two others, formerly in the Middendorf Collection, are now in the collection of Hirschl & Adler Galleries. From 1838 until 1855, Calyo listed himself variously in the New York City directories as a painter, a portrait painter, and as an art instructor, singly, and in partnership with his sons, John (1818-1893) and later, the younger Hannibal (1835-1883). Calyo also attracted notice for a series of scenes and characters from the streets of New York, called Cries of New York. These works, which were later published as prints, participate in a time-honored European genre tradition. Calyo’s New York home became a gathering place for European exiles, including Napoleon III. Between 1847 and 1852 Calyo exhibited scenes from the Mexican War and traveled from Boston to New Orleans with his forty-foot panorama of the Connecticut River. Later, he spent time in Spain as court painter to Queen Maria Christina, the result of his continuing European connections, but he was back in America by 1874, where he remained until his death. The Passaic River rises in the hills just south of Morristown, New Jersey, marking a serpentine eighty-mile course before it empties into Newark Bay. It flows north-northeast to Paterson, where it falls seventy feet in a spectacular cataract before continuing south through Passaic and Newark. William Gerdts, in Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (1964, pp. 51-2), describes the falls as: the most important [landscape] subject in New Jersey during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . . The Passaic Falls remained a popular spot, particularly during the romantic period. Indeed, newspapers, periodicals, and gift books contain many accounts of visits to the Falls, sentimental poems written about them or about a loved one visiting the Falls, or even, occasionally, in memory of one who perished in the waters of the Falls — usually intentionally. . . . Waterfalls . . . were popular among travelers in the period and the Passaic Falls were only surpassed by Niagara Falls and Trenton Falls...

Nathaniel Dirk, 'Cape Ann Harbor View', vintage watercolor on watercolor paper, 1948. A fine, spontaneous rendering, with fresh, undiminished colors, in very good condition; the arti...

Estate Stamp Lower Left

Signature: Signed Lower Right "The Last of the School Builders," by Alvin F. Harrow and illustrated by Peter Helck for the Saturday Evening Post, July 12, 1941.

Ruben Gelardi's depiction of a yellow tram in Copenhagen. Pastel on paper measures 15 7/8 x 20; frame dimensions measure 22 1/4 x 26 3/4 x 1 1/4. Artist'...

A fine spontaneous rendering in watercolor, with fresh colors, on watercolor paper. Signed lower right, with the artist's notation verso H 12, indicating his 12rd work of 1950. A mid...

Marsh, Reginald. LONG ISLAND CITY. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 1929. Titled "Long Island City" and signed and dated, lower right. 14 x 20 inches...

Francis Chapin was one of the most celebrated painters in Chicago during his lifetime. When he was a young art student, Valley House founder, Donald Vogel, painted with "Chape" on th...

Signed on Back